UGLY is right. Romantic comedies are an increasingly debased genre, but few recent Hollywood products have been anywhere near as crass and contrived as “The Ugly Truth.”
This is the sort of comedy that requires you not only to suspend disbelief, but your sanity as well.
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For starters, you have to accept that a control-freak TV producer would accept romantic advice from a sexist shock jock whom she loathes. (He’s been forced upon her by the boss to boost ratings.)
It doesn’t help that the producer is played by Katherine Heigl (“Knocked Up”) in a manner so over-the-top that her character resembles no actual human being I’ve ever met.
Or that her macho love-hate interest — with whom she has exactly zero on-screen chemistry — is lazily portrayed by Gerard Butler (“300”), who spends much of the movie struggling to disguise his Scottish brogue under one of Mel Gibson’s old American accents.
Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith — who wrote the vastly funnier “Legally Blonde” for director Robert Luketic — along with credited co-writer Nicole Eastman, seem to have drawn their, uh, inspiration from “Someone Like You” (2001).
In that forgotten and hardly original comedy, Ashley Judd is the TV producer who turns to womanizing co-worker (Hugh Jackman) for romantic counsel.
I could be wrong, but both movies climax with the heroine improbably being allowed to seize control of the airwaves — though in fairness, “The Ugly Truth” sets this scene in a hot-air balloon amid special effects that wouldn’t pass muster on Saturday-morning television.
But credibility isn’t a consideration in a movie in which everyone behaves in an arbitrary manner. Butler’s salty tirades against women wouldn’t be allowed by the FCC, even in these more permissive days.
And when he turns dating-coach for Heigl — who claims she hasn’t had sex in 11 months because her stridency scares men away — his advice runs to eating a hot dog, really slowly, in front of her latest victim.
Butler’s ostensible romantic rival is a hunky orthopedic surgeon, blandly played by Eric Winter, who accidentally drops his towel when she falls out of a tree into his arms.
Not that anything actually happens in “The Ugly Truth,” which is all blue talk and absolutely no action.
For all the discussion of oral sex, masturbation and faking orgasms, as well as a level of F-bombs more usually heard in films by Martin Scorsese, Heigl doesn’t even take off her bra when she goes to bed.
Considering she’s one of the producers, Heigl allows herself (and the film) to be photographed in a shockingly poor manner.
She does relentlessly hog the camera, allowing very little screen time to the far more comically competent John Michael Higgins and Cheryl Hines as a husband-and-wife anchor team.
The comic high point of “The Ugly Truth” involves a pair of vibrating panties that Heigl unbelievably dons before a business meeting. They are remotely controlled by a prepubescent boy, as Heigl delivers a very poor imitation of Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally.”
Some in the audience with me howled at this. Other ashen-faced survivors leaving the sub-Farrellyesque romp looked like they agreed with Heigl’s character, who at one point says, “I feel dirty.”